hall a murmur of voices which, such was the emotion aroused in me by the imposing ceremony in which I was to take part, suddenly broke the bonds that connected me with my previous life long before I had reached the landing, so that I did not even remember that I was to take off my muffler as soon as I felt too hot and to keep an eye on the clock so as not to be late in getting home. That staircase, too, all of wood as they were built about that time in certain apartment houses in that Henri II style which had for so long been Odette’s ideal though she was shortly to abandon it, and furnished with a placard, to which there was no equivalent at home, on which one read the words: “ NOTICE. Do not use the lift when going down,” seemed to me a thing so marvellous that I told my parents that it was an antique staircase brought from ever so far away by M. Swann. My regard for the truth was so great that I should not have hesitated to give them this information even if I had known it to be false, for it alone could enable them to feel for the dignity of the Swanns’ staircase the same respect that I felt myself—just as when one is talking to some ignorant person who cannot understand what constitutes the genius of a great doctor, it is well not to admit that he does not know how to cure a cold in the head. But since I was extremely unobservant, and since, as a general rule, I never knew either the name or the nature of the things I came across and could understand only that when they were connected with the Swanns they must be extraordinary, it did not seem absolutely certain to me that in notifying my parents of the artistic value and remote origin of the staircase I was guilty of a falsehood. It did not seem certain; but it must have seemed probable, for I felt myself turn very red when my father interrupted me with: “I know those houses. I’ve been in one of them. They’re all alike; Swann just has several floors in one; it was Berlier built them all.” He added that he had thought of taking a flat in one of them, but that he had changed his mind, finding that they were not conveniently arranged, and that the landings were too dark. So he said; but I felt instinctively that I must make the sacrifices necessary to the glory of the Swanns and to my own happiness, and by an internal decree, in spite of what I had just heard, I banished for ever from my mind, as a good Catholic banishes Renan’s Vie de Jésus, the corrupting thought that their house was just an ordinary flat in which we ourselves might have been living.
Meanwhile, on those tea-party days, pulling myself up the staircase step by step, reason and memory already cast off like outer garments, and myself no more now than the sport of the basest reflexes, I would arrive in the zone in which the scent of Mme Swann greeted my nostrils. I could already visualise the majesty of the chocolate cake, encircled by plates heaped with biscuits, and by tiny napkins of patterned grey damask, as required by convention but peculiar to the Swanns. But this ordered and unalterable design seemed, like Kant’s necessary universe, to depend on a supreme act of free will. For when we were all together in Gilberte’s little sitting-room, suddenly she would look at the clock and exclaim:
“I say! It’s getting a long time since luncheon, and we aren’t having dinner till eight. I feel as if I could eat something. What do you say?”
And she would usher us into the dining-room, as sombre as the interior of an Asiatic temple painted by Rembrandt, in which an architectural cake, as urbane and familiar as it was imposing, seemed to be enthroned there on the off-chance as on any other day, in case the fancy seized Gilberte to discrown it of its chocolate battlements and to hew down the steep brown slopes of its ramparts, baked in the oven like the bastions of the palace of Darius. Better still, in proceeding to the demolition of that Ninevite pastry, Gilberte did not consider only her own hunger; she inquired also after mine, while she extracted for me from the crumbling monument a whole glazed slab jewelled